I have been learning a lot about digital advertising and mobile as my interest in music has expanded into video and media more generally. Along the way, I’ve been struck by the resemblance the evolving digital advertising space bears to the early days of electronic trading on Wall Street (naturally, I’m also not the first to make this connection).

I thought I would try unpacking the analogy a bit here to see how well it holds up and whether there are any lessons that could be learned from the equities markets. (This thought exercise takes up some space so for those so inclined, I’ve made it easy to skip to just the predictions and/or the lessons.) For an interesting read on the advent of electronic trading, I highly recommend Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys – very entertaining, even for someone like myself who lived it first hand.

In product development, after brainstorming (or ideating if you prefer) the next step is usually prototyping and concept selection. Picking up on my last post, once you have used the business model canvas to generate a few ideas about how you might leverage resources from the current business to launch a new one, how do you pick which design to go with? How do you prototype a business model? I’m pretty sure a 3-D printer won’t work for that.